Here's a little about brakes and rotors.
Its all about heat and getting rid of it. The heavier you are the more heat you generate. The bigger your tires, the more leverage against the caliper and the more heat you generate. The rotor has to be able to get rid of the heat and the pad has to keep friction during the heating process. if it cant, they produce Fade Gas. Fade means loss of friction. The more you have, the less you stop.
If your stock, most brake's will work, if your moded now you need to experiment.
Pads
Look at pads the way you look at sand paper. Different types and grit of sand and diffrent grades of backing. Anything like this has a friction rating. This is referred to as COF, Coefficient of friction. Its difficult to get the manufactures friction rating especially with auto parts house brand's (duralast gold for example.) Then there's what goes into making the pad. Quality materials vs crap.
If you go to a pad with more bite (80 grit sand paper) They will grab hard but tend to not have a high temp rating and fade quickly. Higher temp pads need to warm up (dont work well cold) and require more force to stop. Think of these in the 250 and up grit. Your metallic pads tend to have a good temp with mid level grip and ceramics have a higher rating and less grip.
What does all that mean? It means unless you know the specs on the pads, you cant really compare. You now go by what someone recommends. Unfortunately when someone recommends something its by brand and not by spec. Think of that like sports shoes, you buy a brand because its what someone recommends but they don't work for you because your using a soccer shoe to play basketball. You now hate that brand. No one told you that particular type didn't match what you needed.
If that particular brand works for you, cool.
Rotor's
Rotors have to be able to get rid of heat. How do you know your rotors are up to par? Look at the color. Is the color even? Are there spots and cracks. Dark rotors mean their running hot but unless you see bluing (blue spots), their fine. If your generating too much heat you need to step up and buy better rotors. Most OE rotors are good quality. Good quality of cast iron and a moderate amount of nickel for strength. The "cheaper" brands run low nickel and a lesser grade of iron. Those are fine if your not hard on your brakes.
I run a real grabby stop tech metallic pad. I can almost lock up my 35" BFG's on my heavy vehicle. BUT, these pads will annihilate a low nickel rotor. They have decent bite cold and I haven't had significant fade yet on mountain roads. I don't drive easy on anything I own either. I have tried most brands of brakes including house brands and various performance brands.
Here are two very good resource for brakes
White paper 1. Read about bed in and bleeding.
White paper 2. read here about "warped rotors".
